Most Powerful Idea Ever

I have recently been transfixed by an idea that will profoundly change humanity.

Here is the explanation. Toss a coin. You would not be surprised if someone flipped this coin and had a head turn up. Now flip 2 coins. It would not be overly surprising that someone might do so and flip 2 heads. Flipping only a few coins means that you typically can observe the maximal and minimal results.

Yet, when you flip 10 coins, you would start to be surprised if someone were to flip 10 heads. This does not seem likely. Even at 10 coins you are already likely not to see the maximal or minimal outcome.

This process will converge to a normal distribution with variance (pqn)**0.5. So, when flipping 100 coins, one would expect 50 heads with a 1 standard deviation confidence interval of [40,60].

This is all very interesting, but so what?

Human intelligence is a very polygenic trait with a bell shaped distribution of effect sizes centreed at zero. Human intelligence would be similar to flipping 10,000 coins.

The implications of this are startling. This should mean that we have never seen anything close to the smartest possible human being. The smartest person ever might have had an IQ of 8 SD above average. It now appears that 100 SD above average should be possible.

Recently published research has started to reveal the variants related to intelligence. A recently published GWAS found 246 SNPs for intelligence. Even with the current research findings the implications for IQ are profound.

People that had that level of intelligence should almost certainly be able to cure cancer.

Erg, thank you for your kind words. Yet, it appears that we should now get ready for a new genius humanoid species. I have no conception of what a 1500 IQ humanoid would be like. I am completely sure that such a humanoid could solve any problem including cancer quite rapidly.

D has been so wise to focus our energies on the positive loving forces that bind all of us to this forum and elsewhere. With this new species of humans on the horizon humanity can no longer hate each and expect to survive.

Erg, I ran a simple little genetic simulation program for the 246 IQ SNPs that were recently uncovered. If these SNPs were optimized using CRISPR, 10 SD of IQ could be added to an embryos IQ potential. This is very startling.

I have hardly been able to sleep for the last week. Scientists were so close to realizing this about 100 years ago. It is possible that there have been some who have figured this out a long time ago. Yet, with the GWAS now actually finding the small variants this discovery simply could no longer be ignored. We have almost been bonked on the head with this out of nowhere.

The Americans have just recently accepted a form of CRISPR as being good enough for clinical use. Their summary concluded that this would not be useful for enhancing intelligence. From what I now understand this is incorrect. Strategically marriage partners, combined with 10 fold embryo selection followed by heterogeneous CRISPRing would have a large effect on human IQ. All of this is now on the table. I ran a program that only looked at the heterogeneous CRISPRing of embryos with the 246 SNPs. This already moved up IQ by 2 SD. Doing simple 10 fold embryo selection gives another SD. These are large effects and the technology is only at the starting point.